The Digital Traces (DigiTraces) Lab at Aalto University, Department of Computer Science, is led by Dr. Talayeh Aledavood.

Our mission is to develop new methodologies and tools to quantify people’s behavior and turn these traces into insights about their mental and physical health and well-being. To this end, we run privacy-aware studies to collect digital traces from individuals and populations. These data may come from personal devices such as smartphones and fitness trackers or online traces such as web browser activity or social media. We develop new computational methods, stemming from different domains, from statistical and machine learning to natural language processing and large language models, depending on the needs of each project and the application domain.

Our work is highly interdisciplinary, and we work closely with clinicians, especially mental health researchers, and computer and computational scientists with different specialties. Our current and past collaborators include (in alphabetical order) Prof. Ian Barnett (University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia), Prof. Munmun de Choudhury (Georgia Tech), Prof. Juhi Kulshretha (Aalto University), Prof Erkki Isometsä (HUS hospital, University of Helsinki), Prof. Gloria Mark (UC Irvine), Prof. Koustuv Saha (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Prof. John Torous (Harvard Medical School).

Through working with our collaborators and stakeholders, we strive to bring the insights gained from our work closer to society, make a societal impact, and influence policy-making in the future.